Applied Research Lead - New York

Protocol Labs, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity incentives

In-office NYC

Visa sponsorship

Relocation support

Professional development budget

Team off-sites & conferences

Job summary

Prime Intellect is building the frontier AI stack and seeks a senior New York leader to establish and grow theApplied Research group. You will lead externally-facing research programs, recruit top researchers, and set the group’s direction while aligning with customers and partners.

You will shape research programs, manage high-stakes projects, and uphold rigorous technical standards as the team expands in New York.

Qualifications

• Experience leading applied-research or research-engineering teams.
• Deep credibility in RL, post-training, agents, evaluation, and ML systems.
• Strong recruiting judgment and external stakeholder handling.
• Hands-on experience with model-training and post-training loops.

Responsibilities

• Shape research programs from external problems and lead early experiments.
• Recruit researchers for the New York group and set research direction.
• Establish technical and experimental standards for the team.
• Collaborate with customers, users, and research partners.

Skills

Applied research leadership

RL / agent evaluation

Recruiting judgment

Python programming

Tools

Python

Job description

Own Your Intelligence

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.

Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.

Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators — including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.

Role Impact

We are looking for a senior regional player-coach who can establish that group through personally led research and field programs. You will begin close to the work: shape consequential external problems into coherent research programs, lead the hardest early experiments and deployments, and recruit exceptional researchers who want the same combination of frontier methods and real-world responsibility. As the group grows, you will set its research direction and the technical and experimental standards that let it move quickly without losing rigor.

Responsibilities

Applied Research at Prime

We turn a workflow into tasks, environments, evaluations, and reward signals, run post-training experiments against real baselines, and deploy what works. When a result looks good, we find out whether the gain came from the model or from the data, harness, inference, or infrastructure. The reusable parts become shared research, open-source systems, and product capabilities.

Every Applied Research role is externally facing. Most researchers work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda.

Role scope

This is a New York leadership role within Prime's broader Applied Research function. It requires research taste, technical depth, customer and partner judgment, exceptional recruiting, and the willingness to remain a builder. You will stay directly involved with external program teams while leading technical work, recruiting, and developing the New York group.

Representative early problems

• Turn the first portfolio of New York field programs into research agendas with strong owners, comparable evidence, and explicit paths from domain result to shared capability.

• Personally lead a high-stakes program through environment design, baseline, post-training, evaluation, and deployment while establishing the quality bar for the growing team.

• Recruit the founding New York researchers and establish a working rhythm that keeps review rigorous without slowing the team.

What you will own

• A small number of the hardest New York partner and customer research programs.

• Recruiting and development of the founding New York Applied Research group.

• Technical standards for environments, evaluations, post-training experiments, failure analysis, and deployed results.

• Meaningful personal research, cross-program technical direction, and decisions about what becomes shared research or product capability as the team grows.

Requirements

• A track record leading high-performing applied-research or research-engineering teams, deep credibility in RL/post-training/agents/evaluation/ML systems, exceptional recruiting judgment, and experience with demanding external technical stakeholders.

• Hands‑on experience building and debugging model‑training, post‑training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops.

• Strong experimental judgment: meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution, and a willingness to change direction when the evidence changes.

• Strong Python and the ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend.

• Comfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current as you resolve them.

Evidence of exceptional work

We value publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, and shipped products as evidence of exceptional work. Show us something difficult you built, what failed, and how the evidence changed your approach.

Benefits and Perks

• Cash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives

• Full‑time, in‑person work from our New York City office.

• Visa Sponsorship & relocation support

• Professional Development budget

• Team Off‑sites & conference attendance